Abstract:Through a critical review of recent literature and policy concepts, this article puts together history and analysis to consider the relationship between 'race' and UK public service broadcasting. Building on earlier work that recognises a paradigmatic shift from 'multiculturalism' to 'cultural diversity', the article identifies a third phase, 'creative diversity'. 'Creative diversity' provides a further incremental depoliticisation of 'race' in public service broadcasting contexts. Here, ideas of 'quality' and 'creativity' are foregrounded over (structural) questions of (in)equality or the positive recognition of social and cultural difference. The article situates the rise of 'creative diversity' alongside parallel developments in the 'crisis of multiculturalism', UK equality legislative frameworks and creative industries policy. It is argued that 'creative diversity' shifts the paradigm of the multicultural problem (in public service broadcasting), enables the 'marketization' of television and multiculture and ultimately continues to safeguard the interests of public service broadcasting.
Almost 18 years after the podcast medium first emerged, 2018 has witnessed its resurgence. With approximately six million (11%) of the UK population now listening to podcasts in an average week, the podcast renaissance raises new questions about the relationship between cultural production, consumption and representation. This paper explores the significance of the new wave of podcasts, specifically with regards to racial politics in the UK and its potential power as an anti-racist tool. Through a series of interview and focus group discussions with black and Asian podcasters in the UK, it asks what role podcasts play in providing an alternative space for 'communities of resistance'. These issues are examined against the dual contexts in the UK of an intensifyingly hostile environment for black and minority ethnic groups and a digital and creative sector marked by social and cultural inequalities. The article suggests that in a 'post fact' international climate of disinformation that bolsters populist rhetoric around minority cultural groups, podcasts have become a rare space for articulating the lived experiences of these groups, whilst also challenging broader patterns of racialized disenfranchisement, including in the creative industries. Podcasts facilitate new forms of social affiliation and antiracism; which we analyse through Fraser's concept of "subaltern counterpublics" to unveil the interruptive potentiality of the medium for marginalised communities seeking to make accessible alternative representations and perspectives on the relationship between race and society.
Diversity' is an evolving dimension of discursive debates within publicly funded parts of the UK media. This article considers how representations of racial diversity in cinema were articulated in a particular moment in recent history. It traces the relationship between the broader New Labour neoliberal agenda of the late 1990s and the UK Film Council's (UKFC) New Cinema Fund, the key funding mechanism for supporting black British cinema at the time. The authors suggest that the New Cinema Fund's 'institutional diversity' agenda represented a symbolic effort by both the UKFC and UK public service broadcasters to redevelop black British film vis-a-vis a plethora of cultural imperatives oriented around the notion of 'social inclusion'. The nature of this intervention, it is argued, was strongly influenced by the 1999 Macpherson Report, which identified 'institutional racism' within the fabric of the UK's organisations. The article examines how such an 'institutional diversity' agenda emerged within the production context of a BBC Film/ UKFC production, Bullet Boy (2005), thus generating a rearticulated black British cinema that was deeply imbricated in the highly politicised contexts outlined.
When Channel 4 decided how it was going to fill what was described in the Annan Report as 'the empty room of British broadcasting', it was agreed that Britain's Africans, Caribbeans and Asians were to be important residents. This was meaningful for Channel 4 because it was tasked with providing what Stephen Lambert then described as 'opportunities for talents which had previously not been fully served' and with serving needs 'which have not been fully defined'.[1] And yet the recent history of the channel has been characterized by the closing stages of a particular kind of 'public service' approach; one in which ethnic minorities have become simultaneously integrated in and disconnected from mainstream output in distinct ways. Twenty-five years on, the channel is caught up in the difficulties facing the structuring of public service broadcasting and in the challenges posed by the highly contentious politics of recognition for the settlement of the relation between a variety of social rights. On the one hand, black and Asian Britons, who as part of the postcolonial phase of migration to the UK might be regarded as the 'old ethnics', do not now appear to be a priority for Channel 4. On the other, the legacy of the relationship between Channel 4, these communities and broader ideals of 'multiculturalism' appears to be strong, not least according to the channel's current claims.
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